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Federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from immigration detention centers around the country in a highly unusual effort that is intended to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said Tuesday.

@1 Kap’n Kornflake – Serial RENEGER, You keep blowing right wing talking points out your ass, but if it is Tuesday it is time for a Drinking Liberally thread, and if it is Tuesday it marks another week gone by since you lost your bet to me on the presidential election and still have not met your obligation to me.

16 weeks and counting!

So called conservative Republicans, they don’t pay their bills. That’s how they roll.

The first round of cuts under Gramm-Rudman weren’t so devastating that Congress and the president rushed to repeal them. In July 1986, Congress had the opportunity simply to stop the sequester after the Supreme Court invalidated its triggering mechanism. Instead it voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the across-the-board cuts. The vote in the Democratic House was 339 to 72, and the Republican Senate approved it by acclamation, not deeming it worthy of a roll-call vote.

In 1987, Congress fixed the triggering mechanism and restored the sequester in Gramm-Rudman II. That deal would have cut nondefense discretionary spending by 8.5% and defense spending by 10.5%, far greater cuts than will be triggered this year. Yet a Democratic Congress and a Republican White House came together to replace that sequester with spending cuts in fiscal years 1988 and 1989 that were larger than those called for by Gramm-Rudman II.

The first rule of comment posting: never, ever, post a link to the opinion pages of the WSJ. That is, of course, unless you want to look stupid.

You’ll find a better, though sufficiently concise, summary of the “1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act” here.

Of particular note:

Meanwhile, Congress and the president have managed to avoid the across-the-board spending cuts authorized by the original Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act. Only in late 1990 were such cuts ordered, but they were repealed in early 1991 after Congress and President George H.W. Bush reached agreement on a budget that complied with the deficit limit for that year.

But, thank you for proving, rather definitively, that the concept of a “sequester” is really a Republican idea.

Anheuser-Busch is being sued for watering down its beer. Many former AB employees, including high-ranking executives, say the practice became corporate policy after AB was acquired by InBev in 2008. AB denies it violated labeling laws or deceived consumers as alleged in the class-action lawsuit.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: I quit drinking Budweiser years ago. It’s not the Bud I drank in college. Years of corner cutting degraded the quality to the point where it’s barely drinkable. Like millions of other consumers, I’ve totally switched to craft brews and imports, because the domestic mass-produced brands are just tasteless colored water now.

The outcome of the contest, which had been unexpectedly cast into the center of the national gun debate, was welcome news for Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York and a staunch gun-control advocate. He poured more than $2.2 million into attacking Ms. Kelly’s chief opponent, Debbie Halvorson, this month. [snip]In Illinois’s Second Congressional District, which includes parts of the South Side of Chicago and southern suburban counties, Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC financed a wave of mailers and television advertisements that criticized Ms. Halvorson, a former House member, for having gotten an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association in earlier elections and for opposing bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazine clips.

In the war against the Merchants of Death, score 1 for the voices of reason.

I don’t drink the national beers very much. I prefer Mac & Jack’s African Amber most of the time. Budweiser sometimes puts out American Pale Ale, and I tried it once and found it really good – not just the lager that is Budweiser’s flagship brand.

Budweiser’s hard task is to make the Bud made in Norfolk, VA taste the same as the Bud made in Fairfield, CA. That’s a tough act to pull off!

Time magazine just ran the longest story in its entire publishing history. The subject? How medical providers rip off American health consumers. If you want to know why American health care costs are so damned high this article explains why.

“In hundreds of small and midsize cities across the country — from Stamford, Conn., to Marlton, N.J., to Oklahoma City — the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt “nonprofit” hospitals into the towns’ most profitable businesses and largest employers, often presided over by the regions’ most richly compensated executives.

“And in our largest cities, the system offers lavish paychecks even to midlevel hospital managers, like the 14 administrators at New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who are paid over $500,000 a year, including six who make over $1 million.”

“Taken as a whole, these powerful institutions and the bills they churn out dominate the nation’s economy and put demands on taxpayers to a degree unequaled anywhere else on earth. In the U.S., people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.”

Let me ask you a question. If there was only one grocery store in your town, and they charged you $45.00 for an egg, would you write a letter of complaint to your congressman, asking the government to step in and regulate that business?

How about if that grocery store wouldn’t even tell you what they charged for your groceries? Let’s say you go through the checkout line with one small bag of canned and boxed goods, a couple of bunches of fresh lettuce and carrots for your pet rabbit named Roger, and a half gallon of milk? And then, a month later, when you got your bank statement you found they had debited your account for $16,850?

That’s what the American health care racket is like today. So don’t you think it’s time Congress did something about it?

The Court of State Security slammed the door today on lawsuits against the Commissariat of Domestic Surveillance for spying on lawyers, journalists, and civil rights groups. The usual suspects made up the 5-4 majority.

In Snohomish County yesterday, a 50-year-old road raging man dragged a woman out of her car, repeatedly slugged her in the head, and choked the woman’s daughter when she tried to intervene to protect her mother.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: I’ll bet a lot of these expensive luxury homes are being sold to health care providers who buy boxes of gauze at Fred Meyer for $1.49 each and resell them to captive patients for $77. At 4 boxes per patient, 500 patients later you’ve got yourself a $1.5 million mansion, just from the gauze. Imagine what you could do with the money you can make off aspirins, X-rays, and blood draws!

# 25, 30: Of course, you don’t need an AR-15 with thirty round magazines in a case like that. Heck, three rounds should be more than sufficient (one for the warning shot, then two in center mass if he doesn’t get down on his knees and beg for his life).

Here’s a selection, courtesy of CRS, of the government functions that will be spared when the cuts take effect on Friday: Social Security benefits (old-age, survivors, and disability) and Tier 1 Railroad Retirement benefits.

@30 “I’ll continue to defend the right of a private citizen to carry, inconspicuously and lawfully, for personal protection.”

How about dogs? Will you continue to defend the right of dogs to carry? If you don’t think dogs should have guns, then what about people who get shot by their dog with their own gun? Do you think people like that should be allowed to carry inconspicuously for personal protection? Against what? Their own dog? Or someone else’s heat-packing dog? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to sit on a bus or in a movie theater next to someone like that if he has a gun I don’t know about. You may have a death wish, but I don’t.

@34 (continued) You tilted at this windmill in a previous thread. You had your head up your ass then, and still do. This debate isn’t about sequester, it’s about what Republicans want to replace sequester with. Here’s an executive summary of what Republicans are still demanding even though voters refused to give it to them last November:

Increased defense spending Deep cuts to entitlements including Social Security and Medicare Fluffy tax breaks for millionaires and corporations

Of course, you still don’t get it, and you never will. You’re too stupid to be teachable.

Any dog more capable than you of carrying on an intelligent conversation should be permitted concealed carry. So yes, RR, I believe dogs should be permitted concealed carry. That’s my dog whistle for the day. Good boy.

@34 (continued) A couple days ago, we had a discussion (if you want to call it that) about whether General Electric pays federal corporate income taxes. I said they didn’t, you claimed they did. I wasn’t able to post a reply that day because the HA website was having problems and I couldn’t get back in. Here is the reply I drafted then. But first, let’s recap: You pointed out that GE pays federal, state, and local taxes. That’s off topic, because the subject of discussion was federal corporate income taxes. Period. The big picture is that total federal corporate income tax collections have fallen to a post-WW2 low of under 10% of all federal revenue, and many giant corporations — including General Electric — pay no federal corporate income tax whatsoever. I repeat: General Electric paid zero federal corporate income taxes in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

These links make a liar out of you. I’m sure GE does pay, as you pointed out, property taxes and other state and local taxes. But, I repeat — morons like you need a lot of repetition, and even then you still don’t get it — we’re discussing the federal budget and federal revenue, numbnuts, so those taxes have nothing to do with this discussion and your reference to them is completely off topic.

God, please send us some competent trolls, or at least one. Pretty please? I guess we’ll eventually find out whether prayer works.

Now, being an opportunistic capitalist, needless to say I own a substantial block of GE stock. I know a good thing when I see it. GE has over 10 billion shares of stock outstanding, and at no time since 1998 have GE’s profits fallen below $1.00 per share, according to Value Line. Now it’s true that GE did cut its dividend during the financial crisis to preserve cash, but they’ve been rapidly raising their dividend recently and GE’s dividend should regain all its former glory and then some within the next year or two. Meanwhile, people who bought GE stock for $6 a share in 2009, as I did, have seen their shares more than triple since then. And GE never completely quite paying a dividend, so their shareholders — meaning me, among others — have been getting dividend income, too. Know how much taxes I’ve paid on all this free money? Zip, nada, nothing. (Don’t bother reporting me to the IRS; this is perfectly legal.) And I’ve already told you that GE paid zip, nada, nothing in federal corporate income taxes on the profits that support those dividends. (My capital gains are still unrealized, because I haven’t sold my GE stock.) Republicans like to whine about “double taxation” of corporate profits, but in the real world, “zero taxation” is much more common. So, now that we have a cash-strapped federal government that got that way through aggressive tax-cutting, not aggressive spending, how about instead of slashing food stamps, Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare, we reinstate some of those corporate taxes that Republicans got rid of? Doesn’t that seem like a more fair and sensible solution to deficits, assuming you really care about deficits? (And whether Republicans really care about deficits, or just use them as a smokescreen to gut programs that benefit the American citizens who do all of this country’s work and produce all of its wealth, but get substantially less than half of the wealth they produce for their hard work, is another subject fit for incisive debate.)

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